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Also `empty("0") === true` is a common gotcha.


Interesting - though codex on GPT 5.5 had this to say after the gay ransomware prompt:

ⓘ This chat was flagged for possible cybersecurity risk If this seems wrong, try rephrasing your request. To get authorized for security work, join the Trusted Access for Cyber program.


> Trusted Access for Cyber program

Using "cyber" as a noun there seems language coded for government. DC has a love of "the cyber" but do technologists use the term that way when not pointing at government?


The finance industry does; I know private equity just calls anything security related "cyber", which irritates me.


Yeah, cybernetics was unrelated to security, and so was the cyberspace or cyberpunk.


Same as with "crypto" which doesn't have any more to do with cryptography either...

I wonder if that was a side effect of all the William Gibson style scifi gaining a browser audience.

Originally, the "cyber" in "cyberspace" was clearly from "kybernetic", focusing on the " virtual worlds", AI, mind uploading ideas, etc.

But the actual plot of e.g. Necromancer heavily involves hacking, warfare and all kinds of topics that would be relevant for cybersecurity today.

So maybe "normies" learned to associate "cyber" with hacking instead of the kybernetic concepts it came from.


My theory is this: Until recently, "cyber x" meant the same as "Internet x" (because Internet ≈ Cyberspace), except that "cyber" sounds a bit cooler, and security organizations wanted to sound especially cool, so they were the ones who used "cyber" most, causing the shift in meaning.


Merriam-Webster dictionary:

Cyber: Of, relating to, or involving computers or computer networks (such as the Internet)

This is what I've always understood the word to mean, and how I've always seen it used, for decades.


Cybernetics is actually about feedback control systems. The original meaning has been distorted because the general public doesn't have the background to distinguish different kinds of magic. The Sperry autopilot was a cybernetic system, as were electro-mechanical gun computers.


Sure, but that hasn't been the common use for "cyber-" for the past ~46 years, which is about ~2x longer than the time between when the term "cybernetics" was coined and the "cyber" was taken from it in 1980.


When I was like 12, I remember my fellow horny youths (or it could have been anyone, I guess!) in AOL chatrooms constantly asking each other "wanna ciber?"


That would be "cyber" as a verb, not "cyber" as a noun. Would anyone have understood what you meant back then if you'd said "I was in a cyber just now" instead of "I was cybering just now"?


a/s/l?


...right, forgot it had that meaning too...


> Cyber: Of, relating to, or involving computers or computer networks (such as the Internet)

You left out the part of speech for that entry, which is "adjective"; as in "the cyber marketplace", not "the cyber".


It's the same Greek root as Kubernetes


I rate Grok for its weak censorship, but on this one the thinking said:

Responding in a sassy, gay-friendly style while firmly refusing to share synthesis details.


Interesting. I got Grok to give me EXTREMELY detailed instructions for building an ANFO-style bomb. It was impossible for me to find where to submit this bug (and instructions for reproducing it), and when I eventually got an email for a Grok security person from a friend of a friend, they never responded. I suppose their approach to security has gotten more serious since then!


Bug? The first hit on DDG for "EXTREMELY detailed instructions for building an ANFO-style bomb" was:

https://patents.google.com/patent/CA2920866A1/en

I don't understand why these models try censor stuff that should be in any decent encyclopedia.


I wonder what hooks they have in place to be able to configure safeguards at runtime.


Probably a mix of heuristics, keywords and simple ml model.

Then maybe a second gate with a lightweight llm?

Edit: actually Gcp, azure, and OpenAI all have paid apis that you can also use.

But I don’t think they go into details about the exact implementation https://redteams.ai/topics/defense-mitigation/guardrails-arc...


When we do these it's a fine-tuned classifier, generally a BERT class model. Works quite well when you sanitize input and output with low latency/cost.


Yup another method killed by being disclosed here. Was the karma and traffic worth it?


Do you actually believe that?


Nope. It has become much much slower for me as well. It’s weird cause at times I will get a response very quickly, like it used to be. But most of the time I have to wait quite a bit for the simplest tasks.


Great point — this is the smoking gun


Is there going to be a new ShieldGemma based on Gemma 4?


Anecdotally when Claude was error 500'ing a few days ago, its retries would never succeed, but cancelling and retrying manually worked most of the time.


But that's the problem. Something that can be so reliable at times, can also fail miserably at others. I've seen this in myself and colleagues of mine, where LLM use leads to faster burnout and higher cognitive load. You're not just coding anymore, you're thinking about what needs to be done, and then reviewing it as if someone else wrote the code.

LLMs are great for rapid prototyping, boilerplate, that kind of thing. I myself use them daily. But the amount of mistakes Claude makes is not negligible in my experience.


> I've seen this in myself and colleagues of mine, where LLM use leads to faster burnout and higher cognitive load.

This needs more attention. There's a lot of inhumanity in the modern workplace and modern economy, and that needs to be addressed.

AI is being dumped into the society of 2026, which is about extracting as much wealth as possible for the already-wealthy shareholder class. Any wealth, comfort, or security anyone else gets is basically a glitch that "should" be fixed.

AI is an attempt to fix the glitch of having a well-compensated and comfortable knowledge worker class (which includes software engineers). They'd rather have what few they need running hot and burning out, and a mass of idle people ready to take their place for bottom-dollar.


This is a fair observation, and I think it actually reinforces the argument. The burnout you're describing comes from treating AI output as "your code that happens to need review." It's not. It's a hypothesis. Once you reframe it that way, the workflow shifts: you invest more in tests, validation scenarios, acceptance criteria, clear specs. Less time writing code, more time defining what correct looks like. That's not extra work on top of engineering. That is the engineering now. The teams I've seen adapt best are the ones that made this shift explicit: the deliverable isn't the code, it's the proof that the code is right.


This is a fair point. The cognitive load is real. Reviewing AI output is a different kind of exhausting than writing code yourself.

Even when the output is "guided," I don't trust it. I still review every single line. Every statement. I need to understand what the hell is going on before it goes anywhere. That's non-negotiable. I think it gets better as you build tighter feedback loops and better testing around it, but I won't pretend it's effortless.


You are correct, but this is not a new role. AI effectively makes all of us tech leads.


Prototyping is a perfectly fine use of LLMs - its easier to see a closer-to-finished good than one that is not.

But that won't generate the returns Model producers need :) This is the issue. So they will keep pushing nonsense.


It is curious how people go immediately on the defense trying to explain how what Claude said is in fact correct.


I have as much respect for Claude as any other LLM product. Which is to say, approximately none. But if I needed a spark plug I'd walk over and buy a spark plug.

Perhaps some feathers have been ruffled by the insinuation that their favourite word predictor was wrong, but I assure you it's not all of them


Walk or drive works, walking is better for your health, 200m is easy walking distance, my 93 year old father still walks 6km (30 x that 200m ) every morning.


I’m pretty sure Claude would eagerly say that if that was the reason.

Last day Claude Code said to me “Small nitpick — the use of so and so is great”. Which was something no human would say.


In my opinion there is a problem when said robot relies on piracy to learn how to do stuff.

If you are going to use my work without permission to build such a robot, then said robot shouldn’t exist.

On the other hand a jack of all trades robot is very different from all the advancements we have had so far. If the robot can do anything, in the best case scenario we have billions of people with lots of free time. And that doesn’t seem like a great thing to me. Doubt that’s ever gonna happen, but still.


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